PÉRIPLES

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to present Périples, an exhibition of new work by French artist Edwige Fouvry.

Fouvry is known for her stirring yet harmonious vignettes, composed of bold line work and Impressionistic washes of color. Just as her portraits delve into the psyche of the sitter, her landscapes traverse the complex psychological terrain of lands real and imagined.

Fouvry continues to work through intuition to deftly render the sublime. Her enchanting scenes beckon the viewer into worlds seemingly familiar yet distinctly otherworldly, their splendor and psychological tension evocative of Symbolists Odilon Redon and Jan Toorop. Possessing a Nabi sensibility, liberated color and shape emote the artist’s own intimate feelings and experiences as much as they conjure those of the audience.

One cannot help thinking of Pierre Bonnard in Fouvry’s new landscapes layered with oil stick and color washes. Through these techniques, Fouvry maintains a dramatic depth of field, as in Les pins, where a distant body of water is framed by a coalescing foreground of vibrant vegetation. The kaleidoscopic vision and high chroma draws us in and invokes a feeling of euphoric wonder.

Throughout her early career, Fouvry resided throughout Europe. Noting how the culture, arts, and mood transformed with the local landscape, she became interested in capturing the link between the environment and the inner world of its inhabitants. Périples translates to “journeys”—a multivalent title that underscores how her portraits and landscapes serve as a map of the subconscious and a way to explore our relationship to the world and to each other.

A further step into the psyche, this body of work emerged from a recurring dream in which Fouvry was one of several seeking treasures both tangible and intangible encased in the local terrain. Steeped in a dream state, the resplendent scenes capture the feeling of a moment and the inner worlds of those present. In Déjeuner au bord de la rivière, we see four figures interacting on the banks of a turbulent river. The quartet consists of a range of characters: a ghostly apparition preparing to dive, a figure clutching their head away from the viewer, a form tucking their hands behind their back and another pushing their way to the forefront. Their expressive gestures paired with the varying densities and tones in which they are rendered offer a window into the social dynamics at play. On view is the breadth of the human experience: dominance and uncertainty, conviviality and anxiety, connection and isolation.

Edwige Fouvry was born in Nantes, France and lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She received her master’s degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels. Fouvry has exhibited widely across Europe and North America and participated in the 2011 group exhibition HEADS, curated by Peter Selz, at Dolby Chadwick Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Art Ltd., and Artension. This will be her seventh solo exhibition at the gallery.